When you start out with a new business venture, it is often just you on your own or with another founder or two to share the responsibilities with. While it can be possible to manage every aspect of your business yourself and take a DIY approach to things you need, this not only leaves you burning the candle at both ends, but also means the main focus of your business starts to suffer as you take time away from doing what you do best to learn things like accounting or try and build a website! The most successful entrepreneurs at the outset tend to be those who understand that it is important to outsource certain elements of the business to experts, and this tends to result in businesses that support each other in a kind of ecosystem.

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Play to Your Strengths

As you begin to structure your new business, you probably have a sense of the other businesses you inherently need, for example suppliers who you get the materials or products you sell from, or who supply other things you can’t do business without like your web hosting and software. These will be important to you and you’ll probably put a lot of effort into picking the best ones and building good relationships. However, you should also begin to consider other things that could be outsourced as equally vital, because they will help you to make your brand strong by letting you and your team play to your strengths and work on what the business does, rather than all the supporting stuff around that.

What Can You Outsource?

There are plenty of B2B companies that offer general support services to other businesses, which can cover things like finance, HR, logistics, and all kinds of other fields. Working with a company like this can be hugely beneficial because if you yourself are new to business, these things would take an enormous amount of time to do yourself yet it wouldn’t be cost effective to hire people to do all of them in house. You can also look for specialists who can fill gaps in your own expertise, for instance design and marketing companies. As well as this, it can often be good to look at outsourcing IT or customer support, if these are applicable to your business.

Supporting Your Ecosystem

Placing yourself within a business ecosystem has a lot of benefits. You can find that by building relationships with your suppliers, they can also introduce customers to your business or even become customers themselves – especially if you are in a B2B niche yourself. You can network very well this way, by gaining access to your service providers’ service providers, and creating relationships between businesses that are mutually beneficial. In local businesses, this can be very important, but it also applies when your enterprise is less location specific.

As a startup owner, think carefully about where involving service providers is the most cost effective and efficient ways to get things done, and then look at how to get the most out of those relationships.